Richard Gilewitz NZ Tour

Flying Piglets present Richard Gilewitz

Acoustic Adventures on Guitar

Richard Gilewitz’s tales are trips into the world of a touring musician. His tunes are adventures, as his instrumental wanderings reveal surprises with each note. His shows feature the best of a man whose distinctive style and delivery create a warm glow of amazement, excitement and admiration.

Featured in Fingerstyle Guitar Magazine's issue on "Men of Steel", Richard Gilewitz is again included in the ranks of noted guitarists who are masters at their craft. Once touted as one of the strangest men in acoustic music, this fingerstyle guitarist lives up to this depiction with his rousing performances filled with amazing chops, humor, and a history of the acoustic guitar from blues to folk, traditional to classical and somewhere in between. States Spectrum Magazine, “Much of the charm of a Gilewitz performance is in the stories he tells. He wondered aloud to the audience how many ducks he could take out in a fight if he were to be attacked by a flock of the sneaky waterfowl.”

Named as one of the top 100 Acoustic Guitarists, Richard Gilewitz fascinates his audiences with fingerstyle gymnastics while spinning yarns too unbelievable not to be true. His ability to make one guitar sound like an entire orchestra, with right-hand wizardry and using standard and opening tunings, stems from over 3 decades of well-honed technique and countless years of worldwide touring, creating his own signature sound that has been captured on his releases, DVDs, and songbooks.

But it is his live shows that always brings out the best in this author, composer, guitarist, storyteller, and humorist who follows a distinct cadence that creates a glow that continually grows a little brighter with each tune. Whether playing solo, conducting guitar seminars and school programs, or sharing the stage with folks such as The California Guitar Trio, John McCutcheon, John Renbourn, Mose Allison, the late John Fahey, Leo Kottke, Norman Blake, Indigo Girls, John Hammond, Rory Block, or Jane Siberry, Richard Gilewitz always creates a sparkle of mood mastery and wonderment.

A must for anyone who wants to laugh, be amazed, and be treated to an evening of great music from this seasoned performer who comes back to New Zealand for his 4th tour.

All About Richard Gilewitz

Richard began honing his skills both as a performer and composer during the late 1970’s at the University of Alabama, playing the local coffeehouse circuit while pursing degrees in Computer Science, Mathematics, and Music. Following graduation, Richard placed his music career in the background and joined the business world of flight simulation design, telemetry and satellite systems. Soon the pull of his passion for music was so compelling that Richard left corporate life to teach and perform full time.

The 1980’s brought Richard to Florida where he released his first LP recording, Somewhere In Between. He has released five more CD recordings, Voluntary Solitary, Synapse Collapse, The Music of David Walbert, Thumbsing, and Live at 2nd Street Theater, plus an instructional guitar video and a self produced solo instrumental collection. Collaborating with Mel Bay Publications, Richard’s Acoustic Fingerstyle Guitar Workshop book with an audio CD and instructional DVD, his All Time Favorite Fingerstyle Tunes DVD, and Live at Charlotte’s Web DVD are favorites among fans. Recent collaboration with TrueFire, the top on-line instructional site, has produced a 20-lesson package titled FingerScapes, to be released in March 2008.

As an educator as well as a performer, Richard is sought after for his popular Dealer/Clinic Workshop Series on behalf of several major music manufacturers including Audio Technica, Breedlove Guitars, LR Baggs, Shubb Capos, Intellitouch Tuners, and D'Addario. His “Meet the Artist/Music in the Schools Enrichment Program”® gives Richard the opportunity to meet with elementary, middle school, and high school students across the nation as he conducts in-residence sessions. Richard also teaches private lessons and Master Classes. He continues to be a contributing writer for Mel Bay Publications on-line magazine, Guitar Sessions®, and for a number of trade magazines, including “Singer & Musician” and “Fingerstyle Guitar”. International Public Radio fans often sample Richard’s wit and zany outlook on life on syndicated shows such as RTE Lyric Radio of Ireland, BBC radio of Northern Ireland, BBC Orkney, National Radio New Zealand, as well as numerous local radio shows.

THE BUZZ ABOUT RICHARD GILEWITZ: “A very accomplished performer, his concerts are like a nice, iced chai latte: smooth, cool, but with plenty of spice.” Entertain Me, Cheri Harris, The Chronicle "You'll laugh as you learn." Columbus Dispatch //

"His quick wit and twisted sense of humor has made him an entertainer as well as a fine guitarist." Fingerstyle Guitar Magazine

"A powerhouse of eclectic guitar styles and genres, Gilewitz wears his influences well." 20th Century Guitar Magazine//

"His complex, energetic originals have made Gilewitz popular on the festival and club circuits as a solo performer." Guitar Player Magazine

"His playing is faultless, the production as clear as a pinged champagne glass." SeeLife, Brighton UK//

"Gilewitz is a solo acoustic guitarist who can spellbind a crowd with his mixture of song craft, sensitivity and chops. It's no easy feat to entertain a crowd with just an acoustic guitar. There are just a special few -- Leo Kottke, Adrian Legg and a handful of others. Gilewitz can stand with the best. His playing has the proper balance of technique, lyricism and- soul." Weekly Planet, Tampa, FL

Blues on Stage: An exceptional guitarist who demonstrated some incredible skills playing 6-and12-string finger style guitar. Gilewitz 60+ minute set featured some of the finiest live guitar that I have heard in a long time.”

New Zealand Tour itinerary 4 – 28 May 2008 :
Sunday 4 May Christchurch Folk Club The Commerce Club, 277 Kilmore Street, Christchurch.
Friday 9 May The Mussel Inn, Golden Bay
Sunday 10 May, The Boathouse, for Marlborough Folk Music Club, Blenheim
Thursday 13 May Lake Taupo Arts Festival
Friday 16 May Katikati Folk Club
Saturday 17 May Lepperton Bowling Club, Taranaki
Sunday 18 May Stellar, Wanganui
Monday 19 and Tuesday 20 May Fingerstyle guitar workshops, MusicWorks, Liardet St New Plymouth.
Thursday 22 May Happy, corner Tory & Vivian Sts, Wellington
Sunday 25 May New Edinburgh Folk Club, Dunedin
Wednesday 28 May The Penguin Club, Oamaru

For details of all performances, see http://www.flyingpiglets.co.nz/
Richard's website: http://www.richardgilewitz.com/

The Southern Man Song

I've been noticing one of the more frequent key word searches within the KiwiFolk site has been for "southern man". I was there (in my role as a Pog) at its inception and it's still one of the most requested songs in my repertoire.

I've written up the history of the song as it relates to the Pog Band but it would be good to hear anyone elses point of view. Particularly, it would be good to get some dates around those rugby games.

Wellingtonians: The Singers' Club Needs You!

June Sizzled at The Singers’ Club!

Our superb guest line-up of Darren Watson plus Bob Cooper-Grundy with Kate Marshall turned up the heat and gave a full house a truly memorable evening of music that had Upper Cuba Streetjumping, despite the winter chills.

However, there will be no Singers’ Club in July! We’re taking a Mid-Winter Break to catch our breath; get ourselves organised and do some recruiting.

We have lost two of our original Residents, Alistair and Catriona, and we can’t function properly with just the two of us remaining to run the club, run the sound and stage and host the evening. Not to mention the odd performance, which is the object of the exercise!

So we are actively looking for one or two new Residents to help us. Ideally (but not necessarily), musicians, who are easy going, with a passion for live acoustic music. They should also have a small talent for organisation and a big sense of humour. We do this for fun!

There’s not a huge amount to do. We’re well set up and we have a full Programme of Guests organised out to the end of the year and the venue and the audience to support the Club. So contact us now as we need you urgently. 021 253 8996

We’ll update you about August and any changes or news nearer the time by Newsletter; and we’ll update the webpage www.nzacoustic.net

But, don’t despair, there will be live music at The Roxy on Tuesday July 31st.

Bob McNeill is in concert at the Café on that night (see below for details), so keep the last Tuesday of the month programmed in your diaries for great live acoustic music.

As ever, if you don’t want to get news about the Singers’ Club, just send us an email with ‘I don’t want this stuff!’ in the subject line. J

The Singers’ Club Residents:
Tony Hillyard & Tracey Haskell

For regular news about who’s playing at the Singers’ Club on the Last Tuesday of every month, go here: www.nzacoustic.net

If you’re interested in playing at the Singers’ Club contact Tony Hillyard:
021 253 8996 or: tonyh@clear.net.nz

Pillar to Post

Our local folkclub prides itself in giving our visiting artists all the bells and whistles when it comes to providing sound for our iconic Victorian venue. A hard room to play at the best of times, so we spend a bit on hiring the right gear for the job and having done a few dozen decent sized concerts now we (me and my team of hardworking, unpaid techies) believe we have finessed the venue. It's a wide, high vaulted room with inopportunely placed pillars but we've found the best layout, built a stage platform and arrange the room accordingly. It's a great venue when everything is working.

15:00 The boys turn up and we start lugging the speakers in (2 JBL Concert series), place them on their plinths, angle them just so - experience has taught us this is critical for uniform coverage of this widish room.
15:30 We're running out the multicore and plugging in the amps - about a kilowatt per side. The thing we know well is that big is always better where folk and acoustic music is concerned. No other music, except perhaps classical music, is more demanding of power for its wide dynamic range (soft to loud) and intolerance to any form of distortion or unnatural artifacts. "Headroom" is key and we strive to keep the sound warm, real and uniform across as much of the room as possible. To do this you ideally need big speakers gently moving swathes of air through the space to avoid peaks and troughs in different locations. It's those annoying peaks that listeners percieve as "too loud".
16:00 The lights are going up and the sound system is ticking over nicely with a CD playing through it. Lines, mics and di's are checked, the desk is EQ'd and things are looking good.
16:30 We're onto the housekeeping, taping down leads and packing cases away. Time for a celebratory beer. No hitches, callbacks or toolkit breakouts.
17:00 Soundcheck time. Enter the Talent, who look aghast and say, "We won't be needing that, this is not a rock and roll gig. We've brought our own gear."

I have to say, I was reasonably impressed with how good their own system sounded given it was one tenth the size of the system we were now packing up. Apart from being annoyed at the wasted expense (money and time) I was sad that, given how good this group was, we couldn't have made them sound as good as they could have. Needless to say, tiny speakers on a stick were never going to cut it in front of 50 plus people spread across a room as wide as this. As expected, intelligibility fell right off 30 degrees off axis, so unless you were right down in front, it was a bit of a struggle.

I suppose it comes down to a matter of trust, really. When you turn up at an unfamiliar venue, do you trust that the locals have got it sussed or do you manage what you can with what you've got. The problem here was that the detail of who was doing what was not sorted out by their agent at the time of booking. We both made assumptions.

Matthias Loibner: tiny hurdy gurdy concert

From the nz-folk list: Jimi Hendrix of the 'gurdy!

http://youtube.com/watch?v=oZKQf-JIvRU

Something from Okinawa

From the nz-folk list:

I particularly like the indigenous music of Okinawa, whose culture is quite distinct from what we recognise as "Japanese". (There are several Okinawan languages. The region has, in historical times, variously paid tribute to China or Japan and was, at one time, an independent kingdom.
The traditional music is central to the local sense of identity in the way that the music of Brittany, Scotland, Galicia or the Basque country is.)

Among the bands that have popularised Okinawan traditional music in Japan, Hawai`i and elsewhere are Shjoukichi Kina and his band Champloose. Here's a video of a slower song. It's played at a live gig, and the band includes the Chieftains and Ry Cooder.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmeJJiXc5oo

Here's something more typically traditional:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWkgWg4-6kw

Marcus Turner

==================

Hi Marcus

Recently, I heard (and was really taken with) some Okinawan folksongs by a singer called Choki Fukuhara, who started his own record-label in Osaka, Japan in the 1930s and released 78s. The Okinawan instrument he played, called the 'sanshin' (similar to the Japanese 'samisen') sounds really like a banjo.

I found this site with a sound clip of Fukuhara: http://rca.open.ed.jp/web_e/music/cards/list/fukuhara.html

And I also found some information here: http://www.pref.okinawa.jp/bunshin/english/con2/06_7shin.html

Cheers

Mike (Michael Brown)

Compadres: James Keelaghan and Oscar Lopez

From the nz-folk list:

As a long-time fan of Canadian James' songwriting, I was sceptical as to how that could be combined with a virtuoso, Chilean, 'latino' style, nylon strung guitar. Wednesday's concert here in Christchurch blew away any doubts I might have had. These guys are sheer dynamite, the songs shine through and the instrumentals are breathtaking. The term 'virtuoso' is overused, but nothing else can describe the skills of Oscar on guitar and in a style that we rarely, if ever, see here in NZ. The close friendship these guys have off-stage extends into their music and the sheer exuberance and fun is there for all to see. They have a wicked sense of humour too. The lack of any comments after their appearance at the Auckland Festival I find staggering, but for anyone lucky enough to have them appearing anywhere near over the next week, don't hesitate... It could be a while before you'll get another chance to see them in NZ, but I hope it won't be. cheers davy [Stuart]

Sound Advice

As we wind down and do the wash-up from the Whare Flat Folk Festival, thinking about ways we can improve aspects of how we run the event, I often wonder how many performers and artists think about how they can improve their game.

My main role is as sound engineer, one of three or four that do the entire festival. It can be quite tiring because, unlike other gigs, you're doing everything on the fly. Especially in the evening concerts, you never know who is going to step up and with what ("Two mics on the drones please and the hurdy-gurdy pick-up needs a pre-amp,") or with whom ("and joining me onstage is the festival choir..."). First priority is just to get everything going so the performance can get underway - no luxury of soundchecks, so it's particularly helpful if the performer produces a bit of signal from their instrument, confirm that it's going then leave it alone while we do the next one. When musicians are alert to this it's amazing how quickly we can get the perfomance underway and start tending to the niceties of tone and timbre.

Good performers make this process easy and painless. I say 'good' performers recognising that there are fantastic musicians who can be completely unhelpful, albeit unwittingly. Here are some things that we soundmen and stage managers really like:

• Say to the audience, "How's it sounding out there?" This is extraordinarily helpful to the engineer because we can take a vote to see if we're doing a good job and maybe get some advice from the audience as to what we're doing wrong.
• Ask the audience, "Have we got time for a couple more?" No one's more aware of festival time constraints than the audience and after all they're enjoying you more than they could possibly enjoy the next act. Or you could wear a watch.
• Just bring your instrument. Rest assured we'll have a full range of leads, guitar straps, pre-amps, spare strings and a tuner backstage. Anything else we can help you with?
• Insist on the very best condenser mic for your thumb-piano, we want it to sound good. You'll know there's enough of it in the monitor when your ears are bleeding from the feedback.
• Just because the soundman is mixing from in front of the speakers doesn't mean that your suspicion that your vocals are too loud is incorrect. In this case just stand back from the mic. About a meter and a half is good.
• In the rare event that you get a sound check, use it to your full advantage, be as entertaining as possible and take the opportunity to rehearse a few numbers you're unsure of.
• Always mention how hot it is under "all these lights" and that that's the reason your instrument is always out of tune. Say, "It was in tune when I bought it!" We love that one.
• When thanking the organisers of the festival for having you, don't forget to say, "Shame about the weather." This is a useful reminder to us to not be so slack about it next year.

Fortunately none of our guests are anything but cooperative and generous and this is the case New Zealand wide in my experience. It hasn't always been the case. I learned very early in my music career 1) it isn't all about me, 2) the festival organisers are working hard to keep it all running smoothly and aren't out to frustrate me, and 3) the soundman is my friend.

The Great Music Stand Debate

Some years ago I started a thread on the nz-folk list about how the use of music stands detract from a performance. Obviously this came with lots of qualification but the thing that surprised me was how vociferously the use of printed lyrics as a memory aid in performance was defended by some indignant list members.

Clearly there are musical disciplines, orchestras and show bands for instance, where music is read in real time; musicians play from the dots, but in this instance, no one person is engaging directly with the audience - even the conductor has their back to the audience. Classical soloists rarely play from music, they know their material inside out.

In the case of the solo or lead performer, whether it be a punk rock band or an a capella folk singer reading from the text (it's invariably text, not music) devalues even the best performance. First, a music stand creates a visual impairment. It not only distracts from the performer, it usually obscures part of them. Second, I get the clear sense that I am being read to and not experiencing the direct emotion of the artist's intention. One does not expect to see theatre actors perform with the script in one hand; playing a song is much the same thing.The difference is in which part of the brain is engaged in reconstructing the (say) song. Reading, although reasonably intuitive in most of us, is essentially a "logical" or "left brain" exercise. Rendering an emotive, humourous or satirical performance is not. There is some complex cognative processing going on in converting text and/or chords from a page to a voice-and-instrument presentation and this taxes the delivery no matter how well rehearsed.

Don't get me wrong, performing from lyrics and memory aids is fine and commonplace in our clubs and pubs - and if that's what you need to perform, do it. But if you aspire to a being more than a campfire singer then it is best to try to develop a repertoire that you can do from memory. I know of several overseas festivals, for example, that would think twice about engaging an artist that presents with a music stand for major concerts. It may seem unfair but in many of these circles it just seen as unprofessional. Some actually say this in their guidelines. They want you to genuinely know your material and not look like a work in progress.